The Wall Street Journal compared the two states in an editorial two days ago.

…let’s do the math to consider which state has managed its economy and finances better over the last decade. …Democrats in Albany are claiming to be victims of events that are out of their control. But they have increased spending by $43 billion since 2010—about $570,000 for each additional person. Florida’s budget has increased by $28 billion while its population has grown 2.7 million—a $10,400 increase per new resident. New York has a top state-and-local tax rate of 12.7%, while Florida has no income tax. Yet New York has a growing budget deficit, while Mr. Scott inherited a large deficit but built a surplus and paid down state debt. The difference is spending. …Blame New York’s cocktail of generous benefits, loose eligibility standards and waste. New York spends about twice as much per Medicaid beneficiary and six times more on nursing homes as Florida though its elderly population is 20% smaller. …The rate of private job growth in Florida has been about 60% higher than in New York from January 2010 to January 2020. Finance jobs expanded by 25% in Florida compared to 9.7% in New York. …The policy question is why taxpayers in Florida and other well-managed states should pay higher taxes to rescue an Albany political class that refuses to restrain its tax-and-spend governance. Public unions soak up an ever-larger share of tax dollars, but Albany refuses to change.

If you want further details on the difference between the two states, Chris Edwards takes a close look at the burden of government spending.

New York and Florida have similar populations of 20 million and 21 million, respectively. But governments in New York spent twice as much as governments in Florida, $348 billion compared to $177 billion. On some activities, spending in the two states is broadly similar… But in other budget areas, New York’s excess spending is striking. New York spent $69 billion on K-12 schools in 2017 compared to Florida’s $28 billion. Yet the states have about the same number of kids enrolled—2.7 million in New York and 2.8 million in Florida. New York spent $71 billion on public welfare compared to Florida’s $28 billion. Liberals say that governments provide needed resources to people truly in need. Conservatives say that generous handouts induce high demand whether people need it or not. Given that New York’s welfare costs are 2.5 times higher than Florida’s, the latter effect probably dominates. …New York governments employed 1,196,632 workers in 2017 compared to Florida’s 889,950 (measured in FTEs). …Most New York residents do not benefit from bloat in government payrolls, inefficient transit, excessive welfare, and deficit spending. To them, the high taxes are disproportionate to the government services received. That is why they are moving to better‐​managed states with lower taxes.

New York’s excess includes spending more on handouts such as welfare. Another cause of New York’s high spending is employment of more government workers and paying them more than in Florida. …New York governments employ 34 percent more workers than Florida governments. …The two states have similar K-12 school enrollments of 2.7 million in New York and 2.8 million in Florida. But New York employs 31 percent more teachers and administrators than Florida. Do the 111,000 extra staff in New York generate better school outcomes? Apparently not…study puts Florida near the top and New York in the middle on school quality. Does New York really need two times more highway workers than Florida and three times more welfare workers? …Government workers in New York make 42 percent more in wages than government workers in Florida, on average.

Here’s the accompanying chart.

The bottom line is that New York is a great place to be an over-paid bureaucrat in an over-staffed bureaucracy.

But if you’re a taxpayer, Florida is the easy winner – which may explain why so many productive people are leaving the Empire State and permanently migrating to the Sunshine State.

I looked last year at how Florida was out-competing New York in the battle to attract successful taxpayers, and then followed up with another column analyzing how the Sunshine State’s low-tax policies are attracting jobs, investment, and people from the Empire State.

Time for Round #3.

A new article in the Wall Street Journal explains how successful investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners can save a massive amount of money by escaping states such as New York and moving to zero-income-tax states such as Florida.

This table has the bottom-line numbers.

As explained in the article, taxpayers are discovering that the putative benefits of living in a high-tax state such as New York simply aren’t worth the loss of so much money to state politicians (especially now that the 2017 tax reform sharply reduced the tax code’s implicit subsidy for high-tax states).

There’s a way for rich homeowners to potentially shave tens of thousands of dollars from their tax bills. They can get that same savings the next year and the following years as well. They can cut their taxes even further after they die. What’s the secret? Moving to Florida, a state with no income tax or estate tax. Plenty of millionaires and billionaires have been happy to ditch high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California. …A New York couple filing jointly with $5 million in taxable income would save $394,931 in state income taxes by moving to Florida… If they had moved from Boston, they’d save $252,500; from Greenwich, Conn., they’d knock $342,700 off their tax bill. …Multimillionaires aren’t just moving their families south, they are taking their businesses with them, says Kelly Smallridge, president and CEO of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County. “We’ve brought in well over 70 financial-services firms” in the past few years, she says. “The higher the taxes, the more our phone rings.”

An article in the Wall Street Journal late last year explained how states such as Florida are big beneficiaries of tax migration.

David Tepper, Paul Tudor Jones and Barry Sternlicht are among the prominent transplants who have pulled up roots in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut in recent years for Florida. New Yorker Carl Icahn has said he is moving his company to Miami next year. …The loss of the super-wealthy isn’t just a matter of reputation. The exodus of billionaires can crimp state budgets. …The SALT cap has widened the gap between Florida and other states with no income tax, such as Wyoming, and New York City, where residents can owe income taxes at rates that approach 13%.

In a column for National Review, Kevin Williamson analyzes the trade-offs for successful people…and the implications for state budgets.

…one of the aspects of modern political economy least appreciated by the class-war Left: Rich people have options. …living in Manhattan or the nice parts of Brooklyn comes with some financial burdens, but for the cool-rich-guy set, the tradeoff is worth it. …metaphorically less-cool guys are in Florida. They have up and left the expensive, high-tax greater New York City metropolitan coagulation entirely. …Florida has a lot going for it…: Lower taxes, better governance, superior infrastructure… The question is not only the cost, but what you get for your money. Tampa is not as culturally interesting as New York City. …the governments of New York City and New York State both are unusually vulnerable to the private decisions of very wealthy households, because a relatively small number of taxpayers pays an enormous share of New York’s city and state taxes: 1 percent of New Yorkers pay almost half the taxes in the state, and they know where Florida is. New York City has seen some population loss in recent years, and even Andrew Cuomo, one of the least insightful men in American politics, understands that his state cannot afford to lose very many millionaires and billionaires. “God forbid if the rich leave,” he has said. New York lost $8.4 billion in income to other states in 2016 because of relocating residents.

Earlier in 2019, the WSJ opined on the impact of migration on state budgets.

Democrats claim they can fund their profligate spending by taxing the rich, but affluent New Yorkers are now fleeing to other states. The state’s income-tax revenue came in $2.3 billion below forecast for December and January. Mr. Cuomo blamed the shortfall on the 2017 federal tax reform’s $10,000 limit on state-and-local tax deductions. But the rest of the country shouldn’t have to subsidize New York’s spending, and Mr. Cuomo won’t cut taxes.

To conclude, this cartoon cleverly captures the mentality of politicians in high-tax states.

Needless to say, grousing politicians in high-tax states have no legitimate argument. If they don’t provide good value to taxpayers, they should change policies rather than whining about out-migration.

By the way, this analysis also applies to analysis between nations. Why, for instance, should successful people in France pay so much money to their government when they can move to Switzerland and get equivalent services at a much-lower cost.

Heck, why move to Switzerland when you can move to places where government provides similar services at even lower cost (assuming, of course, that anti-tax competition bureaucracies such as the OECD don’t succeed in their odious campaign to thwart the migration of people, jobs, and money between high-tax nations and low-tax nations).

P.S. If you want to see how states rank for tax policy, click here, here, here, and here.

Following their recent assessment of the best and worst countries, the Tax Foundation has published its annual State Business Tax Climate Index, which is an excellent gauge of which states welcome investment and job creation and which states are unfriendly to growth and prosperity.

It’s also no surprise to see New Jersey in last place. The state has fallen dramatically, especially considering that it was like New Hampshire as recently as the 1960s, with no state income tax and no state sales tax.

And the bad scores for New York, California, and Connecticut also are to be expected. The Nutmeg State is an especially sad story. There was no state income tax 30 years ago. Once politicians got that additional source of revenue, however, Connecticut suffered a big economic decline.

Here’s a description of the methodology, along with the table showing how different factors are weighted.

…the Index is designed to show how well states structure their tax systems and provides a road map for improvement.The absence of a major tax is a common factor among many of the top 10 states. Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate income tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax. …This does not mean, however, that a state cannot rank in the top 10 while still levying all the major taxes. Indiana and Utah, for example, levy all of the major tax types, but do so with low rates on broad bases.The states in the bottom 10 tend to have a number of afflictions in common: complex, nonneutral taxes with comparatively high rates. New Jersey, for example, is hampered by some of the highest property tax burdens in the country, has the second highest-rate corporate income tax in the country and a particularly aggressive treatment of international income, levies an inheritance tax, and maintains some of the nation’s worst-structured individual income taxes.

For those who want to delve into the details, here are all the states, along with their rankings for the five major variables.

If you want to know which states are making big moves, Georgia enjoyed the biggest one-year jump (from #36 to #32) and Kansas suffered the biggest one-year decline (from #27 to #34). Keep in mind that it’s easier to climb if you’re near the bottom and easier to fall if you’re near the top.

Looking over a longer period of time, the states with the biggest increases since 2014 are North Carolina (+19, from #34 to #15), Wisconsin (+12, from #38 to #26), Kentucky (+9, from #35 to #24), Nebraska (+8, from #36 to #28), Delaware (+7, from #18 to #11), and Rhode Island (+6, from #45 to #39).

The states with the biggest declines are Kansas (-9, from #25 to #34), Hawaii (-8, from #29 to #37), Massachusetts (-8, from #28 to #36), and Idaho (-6, from #15 to #21).

We’ll close with the report’s map, showing the rankings of all the states.

P.S. My one quibble with the Index is that there’s no variable to measure the burden of government spending, which would give a better picture of overall economic liberty. This means that states that finance large public sectors with energy severance taxes (which also aren’t included in the Index) wind up scoring higher than they deserve. As such, I would drop Wyoming and Alaska in the rankings and instead put South Dakota at #1 and Florida at #2.

Those are tempting choices, but there’s a strong case that nothing is as foolish as rent control.

Here’s a map showing which states impose or allow this destructive form of intervention.

California politicians are very susceptible to bad ideas.

True to form, as reported by the New York Times, they actually want to impose statewide rent control.

California lawmakers approved a statewide rent cap on Wednesday covering millions of tenants, the biggest step yet in a surge of initiatives to address an affordable-housing crunch nationwide. The bill limits annual rent increases to 5 percent after inflation and offers new barriers to eviction… a momentous political swing. For a quarter-century, California law has sharply curbed the ability of localities to impose rent control. Now, the state itself has taken that step. …Economists from both the left and the right have a well-established aversion to rent control, arguing that such policies ignore the message of rising prices, which is to build more housing. Studies in San Francisco and elsewhere show that price caps often prompt landlords to abandon the rental business by converting their units to owner-occupied homes. And since rent controls typically have no income threshold, they have been faulted for benefiting high-income tenants.

I’m glad the article included the evidence from economists, especially since the headline is grossly inaccurate. If we care about evidence, it’s far more accurate to say that rent control will exacerbate the state’s housing problems.

Which is why the Wall Street Journalopined that this type of intervention is especially destructive.

California already boasts the highest housing costs in the country, and even liberals have come around to acknowledging that not enough homes are built to meet demand. The state has added about half as many housing units as needed to accommodate population growth, and more than half of Californians spend 30% of their income on rent.Blame a thousand regulatory burdens. Local governments limit what housing developers can build and where. They layer on permitting fees, and then there are the state’s high labor costs and expensive green-energy mandates and restrictions that opponents can exploit to block projects for years. …The upshot is that an “affordable” housing unit in California costs $332,000 to build and nearly $600,000 in San Francisco, according to state budget figures. Developers can’t turn a profit on low- and middle-income homes… And now Democrats want to constrain housing prices by fiat. Mr. Newsom and Democratic legislators are pushing a law to limit annual rent increases across the state to 5% plus inflation. …Building permits in the first seven months this year have fallen 17% compared to 2018 despite an increase in state subsidies. …California’s progressive regulatory complex is contributing to this housing slowdown by driving businesses and people from the state. More than 700,000 residents have left since 2010.

Law by law, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Democrats are chipping away at the policies that made New York City livable after decades of decline… Democrats this week are ramming through rent-control bills that…effectively dictates rents for one million or so rent-regulated apartments and restricts landlords’ ability to evict tenants who don’t pay. …Once a tenant moves out—which doesn’t happen often since folks can pass on the entitlement to friends and relatives—landlords would be required to offer the unit to another tenant at restricted rates. …Nor could they raise rates by more than 2% annually to pay for improvements or evict a nonpaying tenant who “cannot find a similar suitable dwelling in the same neighborhood.” Since landlords would have less incentive to make fixes, more apartments will deteriorate and come to resemble New York City’s squalid public housing. …One result will be less housing investment… Progressives are vindicating CEO Jeff Bezos ’s decision to pull Amazon’s second headquarters out of New York. Don’t be surprised if other businesses follow.

You won’t be surprised to learn that politicians in other nations sometimes make the same mistake.

The U.K.-based Guardian wrote about how rent control has backfired in Sweden.

Half a million are on the waiting list for rent-controlled flats in Stockholm, meaning a two-tier system, bribes and a thriving parallel market… the system is experiencing acute pressures. Building of rental homes almost dried up after a financial crisis in the early 1990s, and there is a dire shortage of properties. Demand is such that it is almost impossible to get a direct contract. With nearly half of all Stockholmers – about 500,000 people – in the queue, it can take 20 or 30 years to get to the top of the pile. …The result is a thriving rental property black market, with bribes of as much as 100,000 kronor per room to obtain a direct contract, McCormac says. Many people sublet space in their rental apartments. …“Rent controls were supposed to enable people to live in central locations, but now it is having the opposite effect,” McCormac says. “People without social connections will have a very hard time finding a flat,” says Kleberg.

And Germany is making the same mistake – even though it should have learned from the mistakes under Hitler’s national socialism and East Germany’s communism.

…the kinds of ideas traditionally associated with planned economies are gaining more and more support all over Germany. …Substantial numbers of people have moved to Germany’s major cities…the supply of housing has failed to keep pace with these significant developments, and this is largely because construction approval processes are so long-winded and the latest environmental regulations have made building prohibitively expensive. …In Germany’s capital, Berlin, …it now takes 12 years to draft and approve a zoning plan, which in many cases is a prerequisite for the development of new dwellings. …An initiative in Berlin calling for the expropriation of private real estate companies has collected three times as many signatures as it needed to initiate a petition for a referendum. …Kevin Kühnert, chairman of the youth organization of the center-left SPD…has gone as far as calling for a complete ban on private property owners renting out their apartments. …Berlin’s Senate approved the main components of a rent freeze in the German capital. …Advocates of such central economic planning react sensitively when they are reminded that it has already been tried… An earlier rent freeze was approved in Germany on April 20, 1936, as a gift from the National Socialist Party to the citizens of Germany on Adolf Hitler’s 47th birthday. The National Socialists’ rent cap was adopted into the GDR’s socialist law by Price Regulation No. 415 of May 6, 1955, and it remained in force until the collapse of the GDR in 1989.

Now let’s review some economic research.

Three Stanford professors researched the issue, looking specifically as San Francisco’s local rent control rules.

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law. …In the long run, landlords’ substitution toward owner-occupied and newly constructed rental housing not only lowered the supply of rental housing in the city, but also shifted the city’s housing supply towards less affordable types of housing that likely cater to the tastes of higher income individuals. Ultimately, these endogenous shifts in the housing supply likely drove up citywide rents, damaging housing affordability for future renters…it appears rent control has actually contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco, the exact opposite of the policy’s intended goal. …rent control has contributed to widening income inequality of the city.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globeshared evidence from a disastrous experiment in Massachusetts.

…a handful of Democratic lawmakers want to bring the horror of rent control… This isn’t happening only in Massachusetts. …Oregon’s governor just signed a statewide rent-control law and efforts to overturn rent-control bans are underway in Illinois, Colorado, and Washington state. …the folly of rent control is so well-established that to deny it requires, as Hillary Clinton might say, a willing suspension of disbelief. Massachusetts and most other states have banned rent control because the harm it causes far outweighs any benefit it confers. When politicians impose a ceiling on rent, the results are invariable: housing shortages, depressed real estate values, increased decay, less new construction. …The longer rent control persists, and the more harshly it is enforced, the worse the problem grows. …in New York City, where strict rent controls date back to World War II, the annual rate at which apartments turn over is less than half the national average, while the share of tenants who haven’t moved in more than 20 years is more than double the national average. …Acknowledging the damage caused by rent control is neither a right- nor left-wing issue. …the communist foreign minister of Vietnam…made…the…point in 1989: “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi,” Nguyen Co Thach remarked, “but we have destroyed our city by very low rents.” …When Massachusetts voters struck down rent control in 1994, it was in the teeth of preposterous fearmongering by hardline tenant activists… What happened in reality was that tens of thousands of apartments were decontrolled with no ill effects… When tenants were analyzed by occupation, it was high-earning professionals and managers who predominated among the beneficiaries of rent control; semi-skilled and unskilled workers lagged far behind. Rent control always ends up benefiting the young, strong, and well-to-do at the expense of the old, weak, and poor.

Meanwhile, Meghan McArdle opined in the Washington Post about the perverse economic consequences of rent control.

…there are a few questions where there’s near unanimity, and rent control is one of them. Pretty much every economist agrees that rent controls are bad. …the policy appears to be making a comeback. …City governments may have to relearn why their predecessors pruned back rent-control policies. Rent control is supposed to protect poor, deserving tenants from the depredations of greedy landlords. And it does, up to a point. …The problem is that rent control doesn’t do anything about the reason that rents are rising, which is that there are more people who want to live in desirable areas than there are homes for them to live in. Housing follows the same basic laws of economics as other goods that consumers need… rent control also reduces the incentive to supply rental housing. …an actual solution to skyrocketing rents: Build more housing, so that the rent controls won’t be necessary… To do that, cities would need to ease the costly land-use regulations that make it so difficult for developers to fill the unmet demand. …Alas, that’s not going to happen… Declining housing stock is just one of the many potential costs of rent controls; others include a deteriorating housing stock as landlords stop investing in their properties, and higher rents. Yes, higher, because rent control creates a two-tier housing market. There are cheap, price-stabilized apartments that rarely turn over, because why would you give up such a great deal? Then there are the uncontrolled apartments, which everyone else in the city has to fight over, bidding up the price. …the people getting the biggest benefit are white, affluent Manhattanites.

So even if politicians understand that the policy will backfire, their desire to get votes will trump common sense. Especially if they assume they can blame “greedy landlords” for the inevitable housing shortages and then push for government housing subsidies as an ostensible solution.

The mother of soak-the-rich Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she was forced to flee the Big Apple and move to Florida because the property taxes were so high. “I was paying $10,000 a year in real estate taxes up north. I’m paying $600 a year in Florida. It’s stress-free down here,” Blanca Ocasio-Cortez told the Daily Mail… Her daughter raised eyebrows with her pitch to hike the top marginal tax rate on income earned above $10 million to 70 percent. She has also gotten behind the so-called Green New Deal, which would see a massive and costly government effort.

The former Governor of Florida (and new Senator from the state) obviously is enjoying the fact that New York politicians are upset.

America is a marketplace where states are competing with each other, and New York is losing. Their loss is Florida’s gain… I would like to tell New Yorkers on behalf of the rest of America that our hearts go out to you for your sagging luxury real-estate market. But you did this to yourself, and you can fix it yourself. If you cut taxes and make state and local government efficient, maybe you can compete… I made more than 20 trips to high-tax states like California, Connecticut, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania to lure businesses to Florida. The tax-happy leaders of those states were furious, which made the visits all the more enjoyable for me. They called me every name in the book. But they were the ones who raised taxes, and bad decisions have consequences. The elites in New York and Washington should commission a study of Florida to see what happens when conservative ideas are put into practice. …Florida’s economy is thriving, expanding at a record pace. …There’s a reason Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s mom left New York for Florida. And there’s a reason companies are fleeing high-tax states, bringing jobs with them to Florida.

I mentioned above that having no state income tax gives Florida a big advantage over New York.

And we should expect more lower-income and middle-class people to also make the same move because Florida’s better policy means more jobs and more opportunity (sadly, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has learned nothing from her mother’s move).

In a recent press conference, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo…mentioned Florida as an attractive option for New Yorkers who are unhappy… a Census Bureau report late last year detailing the states that lost residents because of high taxes, overregulation and dwindling opportunities. Leading the list? New York. …what jurisdiction did the Census folks say benefits the most from domestic “in-migration? You guessed it — Florida… our low-tax, business-friendly welcome to asylum seekers from Big Government states like New York… It’s Florida’s low taxes and reasonable regulatory environment that attract businesses here. Florida ranks sixth among states for new business creation. …Unlike the federal government, Florida balances its budget and does so without an income tax. New York can keep its big progressive government.

And that “big progressive government” means onerous and punitive taxes, as the Wall Street Journalopined.

New York City’s combined state and local top rate of 12.7% hits taxpayers earning more than $1 million and is the second highest in the country after California. The deduction limit raised New York’s top rate by an effective 5%, though this was partially offset by the tax reform’s 2.6 percentage-point reduction in the federal top rate. …According to IRS data we’ve examined, New York state lost $8.4 billion in income to other states in 2016 (the latest available data), up from $4.6 billion annually on average during the prior four years. Florida raked in the most New York wealth. Mr. Cuomo says that “a taxpayer in Florida would see no increase, or a decrease” under the GOP tax reform and “Florida also has no estate tax.” New York’s 16% estate tax hits assets over $10.1 million. …Mr. Cuomo promised to let New York’s tax surcharge on millionaires expire. But he has extended it again and again and now wants to renew it through 2024 because he says the state needs the money. Meantime, he warns that a wealth exodus could force spending cuts for education and higher taxes on middle-income earners. All of this was inevitable, as we and others warned. Yet rather than propose to make the state’s tax burden more competitive, Mr. Cuomo rages against a tax reform that has helped the overall U.S. economy, even in New York.

I especially enjoy how Governor Cuomo is irked because his state’s profligacy is no longer subsidized by an unlimited federal deduction for state and local taxes.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo…we appreciate his recent frankness on taxes. …”I don’t believe raising taxes on the rich,” Cuomo said. “That would be the worst thing to do. You would just expand the shortfall. God forbid if the rich leave.” …In support of his comments, Cuomo cited “anecdotal” evidence that showed high-income earners are leaving the high-tax Empire State for other low-tax states. But the evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. It’s a fact. …From 2010 to mid-2017, New York had a net outmigration of over 1 million people, more than any other state. No, they’re not all rich. But many are. …the wealthy have choices that others don’t. One of those choices is to move if taxes become not merely burdensome, but punitive. That’s what’s happening in New York. …Many high-income taxpayers are leaving New York for low-tax states, tired of paying the state’s bills and then being demonized leftist activists for being “rich” and told they must give more.

Let’s close with some excerpts from a column in the Washington Times by Richard Rahn. He compares New York, Virginia, and Florida.

…many high-income New Yorkers have been moving their tax homes to Florida, undermining the New York tax base. …Florida imposes no state and local income taxes… Florida is booming, with a budget surplus, while New York is mired in debt. Only 50 years ago, New York had four times the population of Florida, and now Florida is larger than New York. …the state of Florida…created an environment where businesses could flourish without undue tax burdens and government interference. It went from being a poor state to a prosperous one. …citizens of New York should be asking: Why they are required to pay such high state and local income tax rates while the citizens of Florida get by perfectly well without any state income tax; Why they have three times more per capita debt than Floridians, and infrastructure that is in far worse shape; …Why it takes a third more of their citizens’ personal income to run the government than in Virginia or Florida; Why their state takes twice the percentage of per capita income in taxes than Virginia and Florida; …When it comes to taxes and government services, people’s feet tell more about how they feel than their mouths.

And if you want to know why so many people are traveling down I-95 from New York to Florida, this table from Richard’s column tells you everything you need to know.

For what it’s worth, there are people who are willing to pay extra tax to live in certain high-tax states. New York City has an allure for some people, as does California’s climate and scenery.

But are those factors enough to compensate for awful tax systems? Will they save those states from economic decay?

At best, they’ll delay the day of reckoning. For what it’s worth, I actually think New Jersey or Illinois will be the first state to fiscally self-destruct.

I shared a very amusing column last year about “a modest proposal” to reduce income inequality.

Written tongue-in-cheek by David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation, the premise was that society could be made more “fair” by exiling – or perhaps even selling to the highest bidder – America’s richest people.

David’s piece cleverly made the point that such a policy would dramatically lower inequality, but would do nothing to boost the living standards of poor people. Indeed, when you consider all the damage that would be caused if America lost its top entrepreneurs, investors, and business owners, lower-income people obviously would suffer immense hardship as the economy shrank.

Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton read his article. Or, if she did, she obviously didn’t learn anything. Her agenda, which is echoed by almost all leftists, is endlessly higher taxes to fight the supposed scourge of inequality.

But our friends on the left apparently believe (or, if they’re familiar with historical data, they pretend to believe) that the economy is a fixed pie. So if someone in the top-1 percent, top-5 percent, top-10 percent, or top-20 percent gets more money, then the rest of us must have less money.

Heck, they don’t even understand the data that they like to cite. Writing for National Review, Thomas Sowell debunks many of the left’s most-cherished talking points about inequality.

When we hear about how much more income the top 20 percent of households make, compared with the bottom 20 percent of households, one key fact is usually left out. There are millions more people in the top 20 percent of households than in the bottom 20 percent of households. …In 2002, there were 40 million people in the bottom 20 percent of households and 69 million people in the top 20 percent. A little over half of the households in the bottom 20 percent have nobody working. You don’t usually get a lot of income for doing nothing. In 2010, there were more people working full-time in the top 5 percent of households than in the bottom 20 percent. …Household income statistics can be very misleading in other ways. …The number of people per American household has declined over the years. When you compare household incomes from a year when there were 6 people per household with a later year when there were 4 people per household, you are comparing apples and oranges. Even if income per person increased 25 percent between those two years, average household income statistics will nevertheless show a decline. …household income statistics can show an economic decline, even when per capita income has risen.

My Cato Institute colleague, Mike Tanner, has a must-read comprehensive study on inequality that was just released today. Here are some of the parts I found especially enlightening, starting with a very important passage from his introduction.

…contrary to stereotypes, the wealthy tend to earn rather than inherit their wealth… Most rich people got that way by providing us with goods and services that improve our lives. Income mobility may be smaller than we would like, but people continue to move up and down the income ladder. Few fortunes survive for multiple generations, while the poor are still able to rise out of poverty. More important, there is little relationship between inequality and poverty. The fact that some people become wealthy does not mean that others will become poor.

Mike then spends a few pages debunking Thomas Piketty (granted, an easy target, but still a necessary task) and pointing out that some folks overstate inequality.

But more importantly, he then points out that there is still considerable income mobility in the United States. Rich people often don’t stay rich and poor people frequently don’t stay poor.

…wealth often dissipates across generations; research shows that the wealth accumulated by some intrepid entrepreneur or businessperson rarely survives long. In many cases, as much as 70 percent has evaporated by the end of the second generation and as much as 90 percent by the end of the third. Even over the shorter term, the composition of the top 1 percent often changes dramatically. If history is any guide, roughly 56 percent of those in the top income quintile can expect to drop out of it within 20 years. …of those on the first edition of the Forbes 400 in 1982, only 34 remain on the 2014 list, and only 24 have appeared on every list. …At the same time, it remains possible for the poor to become rich, or, if not rich, at least not poor. Studies show that roughly half of those who begin in the bottom quintile move up to a higher quintile within 10 years. …And their children can expect to rise even further. One out of every five children born to parents in the bottom income quintile will reach one of the top two quintiles in adulthood.

Here’s his graph with the relevant data.

Mike also debunks that notion that poor people are poor because rich people are rich.

…it is important to note that poverty and inequality are not the same thing. Indeed, if we were to double everyone’s income tomorrow, we would do much to reduce poverty, but the gap between rich and poor would grow larger. Would this be a bad thing? …The idea that gains by one person necessarily mean losses by another reflects a zero-sum view of the economy that is simply untethered to history or economics. The economy is not fixed in size, with the only question being one of distribution. Rather, the entire pie can grow, with more resources available to all.

His study is filled with all sorts of data, but this graph may be the most important tidbit.

It shows that the poverty rate has remained relatively constant, oscillating around 14 percent, during the period when the so-called top-1 percent were generating large amounts of additional income.

Mike then spends some time agreeing that inequality can be bad if it is the result of subsidies, bailouts, protectionism, and handouts.

Most important of all, he closes by explaining that inequality isn’t what’s important. Policy should be focused on reducing poverty, which means more economic growth.

There are…two ways to reduce inequality. One can attempt to bring the bottom up by reducing poverty, or one can bring the top down by, in effect, punishing the rich. Traditionally, we have tried to reduce inequality by taxing the rich and redistributing that money to the poor. …Despite the United States spending roughly a trillion dollars each year on antipoverty programs at all levels of government, by the official poverty measure we have done little to reduce poverty. …we are unlikely to see significant reductions in poverty without strong economic growth. Punishing the segment of society that most contributes to such growth therefore seems a poor policy for serious poverty reduction. …While inequality per se may not be a problem, poverty is. …policies designed to reduce inequality by imposing new burdens on the wealthy may perversely harm the poor by slowing economic growth and reducing job opportunities.

Exactly. The notion that we can help the poor by making America more like a high-tax European-style welfare state is laughable.

Let’s close with a very amusing bit of data about inequality from a report in the New York Times.

The author looked at income changes in each state between 1990 and 2014 at all levels of income distribution.

By looking at the state level, we’re delineating the rich and poor within that state. Which is to say that the 90th percentile of personal income in Arkansas will not be the same as the 90th percentile of personal income in New York. This calculation helps us avoid making unfair comparisons of income between places with different costs of living.

Since I wrote just two days ago about the importance of adjusting state income data to reflect the cost of living, I obviously view this as a useful exercise.

But here’s the part that grabbed my attention. As I was reviewing the various charts for all the states, I noticed that inequality has expanded dramatically in the most infamous left-wing states. And usually not simply because rich people got richer faster than poor people got richer. In New York, Illinois, and California, rich people were the only winners.